This Bridge Will Not Be Gray

An entertaining and informative two-pronged story of how San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge came to be and how it gained its distinctive, signature orange color. The engaging narrative voice will appeal to a broad audience. Kids may find it especially remarkable that by the time the bridge was being built, despite extensive planning, its color still had not been decided ("Isn't that a strange thing, that a very large group of adults would undertake a project of this size and not have a color picked out?"). Other tidbits offer humorous detail: the Navy thought the bridge should be yellow and black so ships and planes could easily see it, and "The Army had a stranger idea: How about red and white stripes?" Readers will be interested to learn that architect Irving Morrow was brought in to make the Golden Gate Bridge design less "stern in style." Thinking "the bridge could be both a bridge and something like art," he campaigned for the bridge to retain its original construction color. Morrow's perseverance - and the community support he was able to rouse - is inspiring. (Today, the famous "International Orange" paint impressively endures: "On any given day, painters are repainting some part of the bridge. They use 10,000 gallons of paint a year.") Tucker Nichols's understated and striking cut-paper illustrations effectively complement the energetic text.